barnsworthburning.net
- What this site is
- Colophon
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- Shortlist of interesting spaces
- Behind the scenes
Your Brain, Your Notes: A clean and powerful notes app for Mac & Windows.
Directories aren’t surging. There isn’t this nascent directory movement fomenting - ready to take on the world. Directories aren’t trending.
But there is a certainly really sweet little directory community now. From the Marijn-inspired stuff listed in Directory Uprising to the link-sharing ‘yesterweb’ collected around sadgrl.online - or the originals at Indieseek and i.webthings.
Barnsworthburning (by Nick Trombley) is a very formidable addition to this community - a clean, multilayered design and an innovative bidirectional index.
One of the best (and easiest) ways to start making sense of a document is to highlight its “important” words, or the words that appear within that document more often than chance would predict. That’s the idea behind Amazon.com’s “Statistically Improbable Phrases”:
Amazon.com’s Statistically Improbable Phrases, or “SIPs”, are the most distinctive phrases in the text of books in the Search Inside!™ program. To identify SIPs, our computers scan the text of all books in the Search Inside! program. If they find a phrase that occurs a large number of times in a particular book relative to all Search Inside! books, that phrase is a SIP in that book.
Highlighter is a personal knowledge bank and collaborative learning network designed to feed your curiosity and help you examine new ideas.
Build ideas mindfully.
Save content, create collections, and connect ideas with other people.
An open collection of notes, resources, sketches, and explorations I'm currently cultivating. Some notes are Seedlings, some are budding, and some are fully grown Evergreen.
Technology is seeing a little return to complexity. Dreamweaver gave way to hand-coding websites, which is now leading into Webflow, which is a lot like Dreamweaver. Evernote give way to minimal Markdown notes, which are now becoming Notion, Coda, or Craft. Visual Studio was “disrupted” by Sublime Text and TextMate, which are now getting replaced by Visual Studio Code. JIRA was replaced by GitHub issues, which is getting outmoded by Linear. The pendulum swings back and forth, which isn’t a bad thing
A meta note, inspired both by Proust and by this book about Proust: after reading a book, when you're making notes, don't refer to the book; just write down the most interesting things that come to mind. This is a better way of digging out what actually struck you about the book; as soon as you have the book to reference, you will start looking up the bits you "should" write about, and end up aiming at comprehensiveness rather than interestingness. Your actual criterion should be whatever interested you. Later, you can fill in quotations & references.
The visual workspace for notes. Humans have incredible visual-spatial memory. Leverage that with Nototo.
- Pause at the end of each chapter and try to recall it (Recall)
- Highlight relevant passages for later comparative reading
- Analyze the book once I’m finished
- Explain it to unfamiliar audiences (The Feynman technique)
- Review topics I care about at regular intervals (Space repetition)
A note-taking tool for networked thought.
A zettelkasten consists of many individual notes with ideas and other short pieces of information that are taken down as they occur or are acquired. The notes are numbered hierarchically, so that new notes may be inserted at the appropriate place, and contain metadata to allow the note-taker to associate notes with each other. For example, notes may contain tags that describe key aspects of the note, and they may reference other notes. The numbering, metadata, format and structure of the notes is subject to variation depending on the specific method employed.
Evergreen notes are written and organized to evolve, contribute, and accumulate over time, across projects. This is an unusual way to think about writing notes: Most people take only transient notes.
- Evergreen notes should be atomic
- Evergreen notes should be concept-oriented
- Evergreen notes should be densely linked
- Prefer associative ontologies to hierarchical taxonomies
The problems are solved, not by giving new information, but by arranging what we have known since long.
Intelligent note-taking. Non-linear file management. Ideas and relationships visualized.
In order that the mind may not be taxed, moreover, by the manifold and confused reading of so many such things, and in order to prevent the escape of something valuable that we have read, heard, or discovered through the process of thinking itself, it will be found very useful to entrust to notebooks...those things which seem noteworthy and striking.
How a tool for sensemaking reconciles two distinct software design ideologies.
At the core of the Brutalist ethos is a tension between two philosophies that have been the topic of a long-standing debate in information design: the merits of “seamless” and “seamful” design, “seams” in this context taken to mean revelations of an object’s inner workings.
Designers typically take seamlessness as the de facto standard for our work, emphasizing clarity, consistency, simplicity, efficiency, reducing cognitive load. We seek to minimize distractions.
Yet what if we can achieve a clearer understanding by intentionally revealing how a system works?
Hunstanton Secondary School (1954) in Norfolk, England, designed by Alison and Peter Smithson. Photo by Anna Armstrong (2011)
When the Smithsons placed the water heater for the Hunstanton Secondary School prominently above the school’s roofline, they weren’t just revealing the building’s infrastructure, they were reveling in it. What does it look like to do this on the web?
Of course there’s no single answer, because the web is simultaneously a physical and digital medium. It is material and it isn’t. It depends on how literally you interpret the question. But taking it somewhere in-between, seeing the web as primarily an information medium, we can ask the question a little differently: what does it look like to design something that is true to the material of digital information?
This, I think, is the brilliance of Notion, and what makes it one of the best examples of “fidelity to digital information” that I’ve come across. The structure of the app reflects the structure of the web itself: digital content is purposefully formatted, like semantic HTML elements, and exists in a hierarchical structure (directories on the web, nested pages in Notion), yet can be linked and referenced to create a complex network of information. And pages in Notion reveal the structure of the information: when nesting a page within a page, the child page always displays on the parent page. There’s no way to create a child page that doesn’t display on a parent page, no way to obscure the structure of the information. The semantic structure of Notion reflects the semantic structure of the web itself.
The concept of seamfulness prompts designers to ask how an object can aid understanding and usage by showing its users what’s going on inside. How can we create what Mark Weiser, later revising his ideas of seamless design, calls “beautiful seams” — thoughtfully-crafted moments of revelation? Notion doesn’t show us how it’s literally working — the background processes constantly running to enable editing, collaboration, and the like. We don’t need to see our car’s engine to know it’s running. But it shows users how their understanding is working, how our ideas are structured, connected, and evolving.